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Before you know it, Dennis Rich has been gone for six years. On October 12, 2011, Rob Pike, a colleague of Ritchie’s for more than 20 years, found out he had died while visiting him from California to New Jersey. As he lived alone, the exact time of death was not known at the time, but was later determined to be 9 October. Dennis Ritchie had been in poor health for years, suffering from prostate cancer and heart disease, according to his brother.

Jobs and Dennis Rich both died in the same month of the same year. Since then, jobs has been celebrated in many media outlets at this time of the year, but Dennis Rich has rarely been mentioned.

Revisit an old article in memory

Without Dennis Ritchie, there would be no modern computing as we know it. He is the father of the C language and co-inventor of the UNIX operating system. Six years ago we lost two people who had a huge impact on the industry.

(John McCarthy, the father of Lisp, actually died in October 2011. October 24)

There is no denying that Steve Jobs gave us innovations and iconic products the world has never seen before, as well as a legion of avid consumers and end users who worshipped him. Such things may never be seen again.

Although my views of Jobs and his company were well documented, when he died, I joined many in the industry in expressing my respect and recognition of his influence.

But the “magical” products created by Apple and Jobs and many others, and all that we now know and write about in modern computing, owe their existence to Dennis Ritchie, who died on October 12, 2011, at the age of 70.

Who is Dennis Ritchie?

The average young man might shake his head. Who is Dennis Rich?

Dennis Rich doesn’t look like some sophisticated, teenage billionaire from Silicon Valley, wearing a simple black turtleneck to a room full of fans, demonstrating cool new products and trolling rivals.

No, Dennis Ritchie is a computer scientist with a slightly scraggly beard, sitting in a messy office in a cardigan.

Unlike Jobs, who dropped out of college, he graduated from Harvard with doctorates in physics and applied mathematics. He works at AT&T Bell LABS in New Jersey, not the glitter of Silicon Valley.

Yes, “What exit?” New Jersey. What exit? Slang for New Jersey, the Garden State Parkway is a north-south highway that runs through the entire State of New Jersey, so it’s a useful landmark. Locals in New Jersey ask which exit of the highway is the right way to get there.)

Jobs has often been compared to Edison, given his eccentric personality and creativity. I disagree with the comparison, because we actually mistake Jobs for a true technologist and someone who invented things.

One important thing to realize is that while Jobs was good at many things, and he did a lot for technology and computing, he wasn’t actually a technologist.

He really has a feel for fashion and industrial design, he understands what users want, he’s a marketing guru and a salesman. All this made him a giant in his industry.

But what about inventors? No, he isn’t.

But Dennis Rich invented and co-invented two key software technologies that are the DNA of every computer software product that we use today, directly or indirectly. It sounds hard to believe, but it is true.

First, let’s start with the C Programming Language

C, developed by Rich between 1969 and 1973, is considered to be the first truly portable modern programming language. In the nearly 45 years since its birth, it has been ported to almost every architecture and operating system that has ever existed.

Because it is a command, compiled, and programmatic programming language that allows syntactic variable scoping and recursion, low-level access to memory, and sophisticated I/O and string manipulation capabilities, the language has become quite versatile.

Ritchie and Brian Kernighan refined it to some extent, and it was finally further refined into ANSI C programming language by the American National Standards Institute’s X3J11 Committee in 1989.

In 1978, Kernihan and Ritchie published the C Programming Language. Known simply by many as “K&R C,” the book is a masterpiece of computer science, a key reference for explaining modern programming concepts and, even today, a textbook for programming in computer science classes.

ANSI C is still widely used today as a programming language, and it has developed many sister languages, all of which have large followings.

The most popular C++, invented by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1985, adds support for object-oriented programming and classes on a wide variety of operating systems, including UNIX derivatives like Linux and Mac, It has been Microsoft’s main programming language for Windows software development for more than 20 years.

Objective-c, invented in the 1980s by Brad Cox and Todd Love of Stepstone software (the predecessor of Lumesse), added Smalltalk messaging, It further extends the object-oriented and code reuse features of the language.

Objective-c was largely considered a little-known C derivative until it was widely used in the late eighties and early nineties on NeXTStep and OpenStep operating systems from NeXT Computer Systems, NeXT was founded by Jobs after he was ousted from Apple in 1985.

What happens “next” is the stuff of computing legend. NeXT was acquired by Apple in 1996, and Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997.

In 2001, Apple released Mac OS X, which made heavy use of Objective-C and object-oriented technologies introduced by NeXTStep and OpenStep.

While C++ was also heavily used on the Mac, Objective-C was used to write native object-oriented “Cocoa” apis in the XCode IDE that were at the heart of gesture recognition and animation on iOS, These features compliment the iPhone and iPad.

Objective-c also provides Foundation Kit and Application Kit for building native OS X and iOS applications.

Microsoft also has its own C derivative, C# (pronounced “C Sharp”), invented in 2001 and used as the programming basis for the.NET framework.

C# is also the basis for writing modern applications based on Windows runtime (WinRT), which evolved into the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) on Windows 10. As the developer of Mono (one. A portable version of the.NET framework, which is also used on Linux and other Unix derivatives.

But C’s influence is not limited to its derivatives. Java, an important enterprise programming language, is also largely based on C syntax (which itself has evolved into Dalvik and the Android Runtime, which are the most basic programming environments for Android).

Other languages, such as Ruby, Perl, and PHP, which form the basis of the dynamic modern web, also use C syntax invented by Dennis Leach.

So without Dennis Ritchie’s work, we wouldn’t have modern software at all.

In addition to C, it also has Unix

I could end this article by talking only about the importance of C to modern computing and its impact on everyone. But I’m only halfway through this man’s working life.

Rich was also a co-inventor of the UNIX operating system. Of course, the original UNIX was written in assembly language, and by the early 1970s was completely rewritten in C.

Since 1969, when the first version of “Unics” was booted on a DEC PDP-7, UNIX has evolved into many similar operating systems that run on a wide variety of systems architectures.

Every major computer vendor has implemented its own UNIX at one time or another. Even Microsoft used to own a product called XENIX, which was sold to SCO (no longer exists).

You can take a look at this chart to understand the family better.

UNIX essentially has three main branches:

The first branch was “System V” UNIX, now known as IBM’S AIX, Oracle’s Solaris, and HP’s HP-UX. These so-called “big guys” operating systems are used by fortune 1000 companies to drive critical, transaction-oriented business applications and databases.

Without System V UNIX, fortune 1000 companies couldn’t get anything done. Business is almost at a standstill. They may account for only 10 to 20 percent of computing power in any given enterprise, but that 20 percent is significant.

The second branch is BSD (Berkeley System Distribution), which contains FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, which are the foundation of Max OS X and iOS. They are also used to support critical infrastructure backbones on which the Internet runs.

The third branch doesn’t even count as a branch – GNU/Linux. The Linux kernel (developed by Linus Torvalds), along with GNU user-space programs, tools, and utilities, provides a completely reimplemented “Unix-like,” or “UniX-compatible,” operating system.

Of course Linux is also the most destructive of all UNIX operating systems. It can be found in everything from very small embedded microprocessors to smartphones, tablets and desktops, and even powerful supercomputers.

IBM’s Watson is one such Linux supercomputer, as seen in the game Risk! Even beat Ken Jennings in front of everyone.

But it’s important to recognize that Linux and GNU don’t contain any UNIX code — hence the free software recursive phrase “GNU’s not UNIX.” (Translator’s Note: GNU is short for GNU’s Not UNIX, GNU’s Not UNIX => (GNU’s Not UNIX) ‘s Not UNIX => ((GNU’s Not UNIX)’ s Not UNIX) ‘s Not UNIX =>… If you are interested in PHP, XNA, etc.)

But GNU/Linux is designed to behave much like UNIX, It’s safe to say that without Ritchie and his colleagues at Bell LABS (Brian Kernighan, Ken Thompson, Douglas Mcllroy, and Joe Ossanna) having pioneered UNIX, There would be no Linux or any open source software movement.

In that sense, the Free Software Foundation or Richard Stallman was glad to see Jobs go.

We owe Dennis Rich a lot

Although there are religious and ideological differences. But we owe Dennis Rich more than we know. Without his contributions, we wouldn’t have access to personal computers, sophisticated software applications or even the Internet.

No Android smartphones, no expensive DVRS and streaming devices, no Steve Jobs and Apple creating the amazing Mac and iPad.

No Microsoft Windows 10 or Surface Book.

There’s no cloud computing, there’s no AWS, there’s no Azure.

There are no “apps made for XX” and no such thing as the Internet.

Hats off to Dennis Ritchie — for giving us the technology that allowed us to become the experts we are today.

Dennis Ritchie (left) and Ken Thomson in front of a PDP-12 in 1972 (credit: Dennis Ritchie’s homepage)

From: CPP developer wechat official account